“Yes, my lord,” Selfer said.

“I will go up and speak to the nursemaids; they’ll be wondering why I haven’t sent Restin up to bed.”

“You aren’t going to tell them?”

“That I killed a nine-winters child? No. Tomorrow I must try to get them to understand what he was, what the death-sickness was, but not tonight. The children who aren’t involved need sleep.” She yawned. “So do I. I will tell them he’ll sleep somewhere else.”

“They’ll worry—”

“I can’t help that,” Dorrin said. “It’s the business of nurserymaids to worry.”

Upstairs, she found, as she expected, the senior maid at the door of the nursery, looking worried.

“My lord, Restin should be in bed—it’s past time—”

“I know,” Dorrin said. “He is in bed, but not here. He is old enough to have a room of his own, you know.”

“Yes, but—”

“He is sleeping,” Dorrin said, putting just a touch of power into it.

The maid’s worried face smoothed. “Yes, my lord.”

“Just take care of the others,” Dorrin said. “And get some sleep. If the weather’s fair tomorrow, you can take them out in small groups to exercise in the garden.”

“Yes, my lord.” The maid curtsied and went into the nursery, dimly lit by a lamp at either end. Dorrin caught a glimpse of the rows of beds, the little lumps of sleeping children, before the door closed.

She went back downstairs. She didn’t want to sleep in the dining room, but she was desperate for sleep. In the end, she slept in the main reception room, in bedding taken from the rooms upstairs, with her own Phelani soldiers on guard.

She woke at dawn, to the low-voiced mutters of two guards wagering on when she’d wake, before or after they’d been relieved for breakfast.

“Before,” Dorrin said from her nest of blankets.

“You could’ve slept another glass or two, Captain,” one said.

“My lord, Sef; say my lord. She’s a duke now, not a captain.”

The two most inveterate gamblers in the cohort. “I might have known,” Dorrin said. “Black Sef and Merik. You two would wake a corpse, arguing odds.”

“We was really quiet,” Sef said. “Just barely said a thing—”

“I wasn’t awake,” Dorrin said. “And now I am. That’s how loud you didn’t talk.”

“Sorry, Cap—my lord,” Merik said.

“I needed to get up anyway.” She felt rested, but dirty, itching with the need to bathe. Today, surely, she could find time to get clean all over. And make real plans for the next days, not just reacting to one thing after another. Somewhere out there still more Verrakai plotted the realm’s destruction. “Light more lamps. I’m going to see if the kitchen’s stirring.”

“It is,” Sef said. “I smell sib.”

Dorrin could too, now that she paid attention. “Good,” she said. “I want hot water.” She picked up her pack with its change of clothes, and headed for the kitchen.

There, warmth came from both the hearth and the ovens. Two young cooks thumped at lumps of dough, a row of lumps under a cloth would be ready when the oven heated, a can of sib simmered at the edge of the hearth, and a pot of porridge hung from a hook bubbled even as a red-faced maid stirred it.